We all know of Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine episode, when the narrator in Du côté de chez Swann bites into one of those French cakes (not biscuit, please.) and its flavour suddenly starts unfolding memories from his past, that his mind had buried deep but that his body was able to awaken. Like Remy’s ratatouille for Anton Ego!
But although this is the first “involuntary memory” episode of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, it is not the last. In fact, the quality that has the most power over involuntary memory in the longest novel of all time, is sound.
My favourite moment is the ending (I know, I make it sound like I read the whole of the Recherche when in fact I only read the first and last volumes and hope life will grant me the Time – see what I did there – to delve into the remaining five). In Le Temps retrouvé, after so many years have passed, the narrator hears the family home bell ring. This ring, which he had long forgotten about, suddenly triggers the childhood memory that had introduced the novel, and is thus not only key to the narrative but also to the narrator’s identity.
The most important revelation here is not necessarily rediscovering memories we didn’t know we had lost, but rather realising that our body itself can be the watchman of our memories, and be even more effective than our mind in linking our past and present, thus insuring the continuity of the self.
I don’t know about you, but I personally get to experience this awakening of involuntary memory quite often (something I have in common with Marcel, in addition to writing in my bed). This is mostly due to a habit I have, which is particularly annoying for anyone living with me (aka my husband), of finding an artist, an album or a film soundtrack I really enjoy, and listening to it, over and over, and over, before moving on to the next musical obsession.
Because of it, any Sum 41 song immediately makes me think of my high school days spent with Mercia, my partner in crime at the time. It’s also the reason My Chemical Romance’s last album Danger Days is the mirror to to my winter of 2010, just like the soundtrack of Call me by your name is to the moment I moved to Paris to start out in life. And it is why this TikTok sound automatically triggers my memory of lockdown number 1 (as does the smell of saro essential oil I drenched my wrists with daily for three months).
Involuntary memory is why the first drum beat of “Fearless” alone can take me back to the car ride to school when I was Fifteen, unaware of all the memories each Taylor Swift album would eventually appropriate throughout the next eleven years… to the point I even worry now when she releases a new album at a time in my life I would rather not remember (sadly, “champagne problems” might forever be linked to my own literal champagne problems…).
I have also come to find we can exercise some power over our involuntary memory. A while back, before I’d ever read Proust, I decided to mix reading with music. I would pick a book, and a piece of music I imagined would fit the story well (despite not having read it) and played that track from the first to the last pages. I enjoyed securing my own choice of soundtrack for my readings, although some would have found it terribly repetitive. But in the end, it’s thanks to Johann Strauss’s “Brüderlein, Brüderlein” from my old “In Classical Mood” CD that I can dive back into my favourite Maupassant novel, Une vie, without even opening the book; this Chopin concerto takes me back to Madame Bovary’s hopeless days. And if I ever want to experience Proust nowadays, all I do is press play on Debussy’s “Rêverie”.
I even mixed things up a little with film soundtracks. I would hijack them by turning them into the soundtrack of the stories of my choice: in my mind, “Sur le fil” is no longer a track from Amélie Poulain but the main theme to Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, and “The Portrait” (a Titanic track) is actually what amplified my emotions when reading the last volumes of Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket and will thus forever be connected to them.
There’s definitely room to play. So what if you tried inducing your own involuntary memory… you know, voluntarily? #ProustYourself
Other things more or less related to Proust that I liked:
This man whose hands still remember how to play a song he’d composed on the piano decades ago, despite his dementia
This interview with Amélie Nothomb who will tell you, among other things, why you should read Proust
An essential read: Call me by your name by André Aciman and this talk where he speaks very well about other fascinating aspects of Proust
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Sum 41’s ‘Best of Me’ will always bring me back to our high school years and particularly singing (shouting?) off key the words to you and Jean in your poster filled bedrooom. I love this 🤗